ConstableJelly

I sympathize with the cynicism in your last paragraph, but I push a little optimism back on a couple points. 1: our capability for speech may be limited by the corporations who have grabbed control over our media platforms, but insofar as freedom of speech refers to our ability to speak freely without retaliation from the government, we do still have real free speech. It’s a juvenile point, but given events in the last few years it’s not a right I take for granted as I did previously. That being said, I did just watch a video of FBI agents interrogating a woman in front of her house for posting non-violent content on Facebook relating to Gaza that you can add to a pile of evidence that the government is frequently toeing the line on free speech, so… that’s not good.

2: Regulatory authority has become almost laughably meek, granted, but you’re commenting on a video of one of the most aggressive regulators to hold the position in as long as I’m aware. This is a powerful sign that regulatory capture is not inevitable if we care enough to vote for candidates who will appoint strong regulators – even if it hurts our pride to do so (<<conscientious vote objectors).

First two books in the series were “Fellowship of the King” and “The Two Trees” so…I’m not entirely convinced they were even very original stories…

One of the earliest pieces of media I can remember consuming was the mid-90s TV show Viper, where James played the main character. I remember very little about the show except James’s face and that he played his character cool as fuck.

I’ve been replaying Alan Wake and Control recently, and I have such a soft spot for his roles in them because I loved that stupid show when I was a kid.

We replaced our HP OfficeJet with a Brother this year. I don’t even know what we were thinking getting the HP 5 years ago or so, it was gross overkill for us. But of all the things it could do, it was most consistent with printing like shit and jamming paper. Part of the problem was that we just print too infrequently, but having to replace overpriced cartridges from HP didn’t help. You also have to install apps for wireless printing (or if there’s a workaround we didn’t bother with it).

The Brother is a color laser printer and it’s perfect for us. No apps needed, super quiet and hassle-free (there have been no paper jams or transmission errors), and the print quality is crisp as hell.

I had thought for years that ACA had eliminated these kinds of plans. I’m guessing I heard about that being included in one of those infamous earlier drafts before the free-market neo-liberals ripped it apart.

It’s just a way to subscribe directly to content sources rather than subscribing to a creator’s social media account or a subreddit or something. So if there’s a blog you like and you use your RSS reader to subscribe to that blog, any new posts will be fed directly to your reader. Obviously, the benefit then is that you have a central portal with a direct connection to all of your selected content sources.

Just to play devil’s advocate, and full disclosure my only Lemmy account is on Beehaw, they’re not doing this out of a sense of judgment, they’re very explicitly trying to create safer, friendlier online community, and since lemmy.world has gotten so big with no signup gate, the moderation policy there doesn’t align with theirs and is beginning to impact Beehaw. They claim this is very hopefully a temporary measure at least until there are more robust moderation tools.

That being said, I’ll spend a little more time here on kbin to check out the broader community :-).